Slate writer: BuzzFeed pillages Reddit for its viral photo posts

How does this one site come up with so many simple ideas that people want to spread far and wide? What’s their secret?

The answer, in short, is that BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell, deliberately—their posts are hard to trace back to the original source material.

… Once you understand how central Reddit is to BuzzFeed, it’s like spotting the wizard behind the curtain. Whenever you see a popular BuzzFeed post, search Reddit, and all will be revealed.

Where Manjoo’s post hits hardest, I think, is when it suggests that BuzzFeed steals ideas. …
By far the weakest charge is that BuzzFeed grabs content from Reddit. Literally everyone does. Literally everyone. The Pope shares popular things he sees on Reddit. At any given moment, the most popular thing on Gawker is a post from Reddit or a similar viral site.

Photos and videos and stories have become atoms whipping around the web, rubbing away most vestiges of provenance. Stealing the formulas for molecules constructed from those atoms — as Manjoo suggests BuzzFeed does — is a much clearer violation of Internet ethics.